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PanoVRama - an open source panoramic visualization system

So, what is PanoVRama? PanoVRama is a tiled multiprojector panoramic visualization system developed on Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb. It consists of 6 projectors that are projecting onto a circular canvas, thus providing a 360 degree panoramic visualization. At first, it was only capable of showing panoramic images and videos, but now it also supports Google Earth/Google Street View navigation and flight simulation using Flight Gear simulator.

I would like to thank Phoronix for this article, which motivated me to port Flight Gear simulator to PanoVRama system. And I did that as part of my graduate thesis. A colleague of mine added support for Google navigation as part of his thesis.

The other thing that is also important is the technology being used: X composite + GL_texture_from_pixmap. Yes, indeed this system actually works as a giant compositor with the difference to usual compositors that it uses aforementioned extensions to capture the image from a window and then transform it so that it forms a giant panoramic image.

The system is distributed, i.e. there are 3 slave computers in which each has 2 projectors. The base system is Arch Linux, but it should work with other distributions as well (we first developed in on Ubuntu, but Ubuntu was too bloated for our taste for slave computers ).

There is also an idea to enable 360 degree panoramic desktop using X, but currently this is not possible due to distributed nature of the system (one would have to synchronize desktops and all applications being used on all computers). Actually, this may be possible, but more research is required.

So, what is PanoVRama? PanoVRama is a tiled multiprojector panoramic visualization system developed on Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb. It consists of 6 projectors that are projecting onto a circular canvas, thus providing a 360 degree panoramic visualization. At first, it was only capable of showing panoramic images and videos, but now it also supports Google Earth/Google Street View navigation and flight simulation using Flight Gear simulator.

I would like to thank Phoronix for this article, which motivated me to port Flight Gear simulator to PanoVRama system. And I did that as part of my graduate thesis. A colleague of mine added support for Google navigation as part of his thesis.

The other thing that is also important is the technology being used: X composite + GL_texture_from_pixmap. Yes, indeed this system actually works as a giant compositor with the difference to usual compositors that it uses aforementioned extensions to capture the image from a window and then transform it so that it forms a giant panoramic image.

The system is distributed, i.e. there are 3 slave computers in which each has 2 projectors. The base system is Arch Linux, but it should work with other distributions as well (we first developed in on Ubuntu, but Ubuntu was too bloated for our taste for slave computers ).

There is also an idea to enable 360 degree panoramic desktop using X, but currently this is not possible due to distributed nature of the system (one would have to synchronize desktops and all applications being used on all computers). Actually, this may be possible, but more research is required.

the bolded 360 degree panoramic desktop seems interesting, (after all the new buzz word is "the cloud" where the money is) so you should probably look at the old MBone sources code and use Multicast at the core of your framework for any number of distributed servers (local and remote) if your going to do it ,do it right and make Multicast (P2p Distributed hash tables Routing mesh etc as an extra credit) tunnels for everything its about time someone did.

if your going to do it you might as well think bigger and longer term and write usable generic code framework updating the old Mbone code and open idea's as your base after all http://www.usinglinux.org/mbone/

http://bamboo-dht.org/tutorial.html
Marcel has also written a report about his experiences building a multicast protocol on top of Bamboo. It may also be useful for tutorial purposes.